Wednesday, October 22, 2008

Fleecing the low-hanging fruit

Among students who finished in the bottom 40% of their High School classes, two-thirds hadn't gotten a college degree after eight and a half years of higher ed. Should colleges be admitting these kids, if they're not likely to graduate? Marty Nemko says that many parents should reconsider college for their kids. Read here.

3 comments:

Brian Dunbar said...

Works for me. It would help if high school would quit pushing 'college' as a goal for 100% of the student body.

It might also help if our local Vo-Tech would stop being a 'junior college' and call itself what it really is - a vocational technical school.

Rufus said...

I really think companies don't need to push it for so many employees either. I can't imagine why a manager at Budget Rent-a-car, for example, should be required to have a college degree.

Holly said...

The thing that gets me is companies that institute degree requirements without grandfathering. I know several talented programmers who lost jobs they'd had for 10+ years because of not having a college degree. It was very much akin to discovering that someone is felon... suddenly they're no longer capable of doing whatever they've been doing for 10 years? Pull the other one!

The article about how college isn't for everyone is right, but it doesn't really address the parental factor. Not that many parents want to think about how their kid might be that person who has to make the french fries. Someone's gotta do it. Someone's gotta clean toilets.

And, no, it doesn't take a degree to issue keys and get paperwork signed for Rent-a-Wreck, but if you as a hiring manager need some way to choose between two similarly unready candidates, you're going to go for the one with loans to pay off, because *that* is the one who will come to work every damn day.